Israel‘s raid on the Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip is fueling an international backlash over the Jewish state’s campaign against Hamas, and the dueling narratives about the operation underscore how divisive Israel‘s military operation has become.
Israeli special forces late Tuesday entered the Gaza facility, the largest hospital in the Palestinian enclave, saying Hamas militants are using the site as a command center and a weapons depot.
The raid was met with sharp condemnation abroad, including at the United Nations, where top officials implored Jerusalem that “hospitals are not battlegrounds” and that the young, sick and elderly inside the hospital must be kept safe.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan calls Israel ‘terrorist state’; U.N. pleads with Israel to change course
But Israel maintains it had little choice but to mount an operation. The militant group Hamas, which on Oct. 7 launched a terror attack on Israel that killed 1,400 Israelis and resulted in more than 240 people taken hostage, is intentionally using the hospital as a shield, Israeli officials said. Israel also argued that Hamas intentionally used the ground beneath sensitive sites such as hospitals to construct key parts of its elaborate Gaza tunnel network.
“While we and most countries do everything we can to protect the sick, sadly that’s not the case in Gaza. Hamas sees ill Gazans as an opportunity — an opportunity to put the most vulnerable in the line of fire,” Israeli Defense Forces Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler said in a social media post explaining why the IDF launched the raid.
“We know Hamas has done this for years,” Col. Shefler said. “Hamas terrorists have embedded themselves deliberately in any place they could, be it schools, kindergartens, and hospitals. Hamas, in the most cynical way, is not only using the fuel, the electricity, the oxygen, the medicine from hospitals, but is using the most vulnerable, the sick and the ill, as human shields. This is what we are up against.”
At the hospital, Munir al-Boursh, a senior official with Gaza’s Health Ministry, told The Associated Press that Israeli forces had ransacked the basement and other buildings at Shifa, including those housing the emergency and surgery departments.
The Health Ministry said 40 patients, including three babies, have died since Shifa’s emergency generator ran out of fuel Saturday. Another 36 babies are at risk of dying because there is no power for incubators, the AP reported.
Gaza’s Health Ministry is run by Hamas, and its figures have not been independently verified. Many of its assertions are unable to be fully corroborated by outside groups, given the intense fighting in Gaza.
Israel said that while conducting the raid, its troops delivered incubators, baby food, medicine and other badly needed supplies to the facility.
But that has done little to quell the growing anger abroad.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an outspoken critic of Israel‘s campaign against Hamas, ramped up his rhetoric Wednesday.
“Israel is implementing a strategy of total destruction of a city and its people,” Mr. Erdogan said, according to English-language media translations of his remarks. “I say openly that Israel is a terrorist state.”
At the U.N., officials pleaded with Israel to change course.
“Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” U.N. relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said Wednesday, while also stressing that Hamas must not use “a place like a hospital as a shield for their presence.”
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